The story
As you stand on the south side of St Stephen’s Green, look toward numbers 85 and 86. You are looking at Newman House, a place where the soul of modern Irish literature was forged. These two townhouses, though joined together, offer a striking visual contrast.
Number 85 is a masterclass in Palladian stone, built in the 1730s, while its neighbor, number 86, is a much larger, red-brick Victorian structure. Together, they served as the original home of the Catholic University of Ireland, founded by John Henry Newman in 1854. Step closer and imagine the young James Joyce walking through these very doors at the turn of the 20th century.
Before he was the world-renowned author of Ulysses, Joyce was a student of English and languages right here. It was in these drafty rooms and under these ornate ceilings that he honed his fierce intellect and began to rebel against the very institutions that educated him. If you’ve read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, you’ve essentially walked these halls through his prose; the physical reality of this house provided the backdrop for Stephen Dedalus’s intellectual awakening.
But Joyce wasn’t the only literary giant to haunt these corridors. Upstairs, in the more somber quarters of number 86, lived the Jesuit priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. He served here as a Professor of Classics from 1884 until his death in 1889.
Hopkins found Dublin a lonely place, and it was in this house that he wrote his famous "Terrible Sonnets," poems of deep spiritual struggle and profound beauty. When you look up at the windows of the upper floors, think of him sitting there, capturing the "sprung rhythm" of the English language while battling a deep, persistent melancholy. The interior of the house holds a different kind of drama.
Behind the somber facades lie some of the most spectacular baroque ceilings in Europe. The Lafranchini brothers, master stuccodores from Switzerland, decorated the Apollo Room in number 85 with exuberant, three-dimensional plasterwork. Apollo himself presides over the walls, surrounded by the nine muses, their limbs practically leaping off the flat surfaces.
It is a riot of 18th-century luxury that stands in stark contrast to the austere academic life that followed later. Today, Newman House is part of the Museum of Literature Ireland, or MoLI. It remains a bridge between the aristocratic Dublin of the 1700s and the revolutionary literary Dublin of the 1900s.
Whether you are a fan of Joyce’s modernist puzzles or Hopkins’ rhythmic prayers, this house is where the intellectual heart of Ireland began to beat with a new, unmistakable rhythm. Take a moment to appreciate the quiet gravity of the site before you continue your stroll around the Green.